When it comes to home interiors, lighting is more than just a necessity. It’s a defining element of interior design and architecture. If the lighting is carefully analysed, it can enhance form, shape the mood, and highlight the best features of your home. So, aside from new home builders, you should also consult with an interior designer even if the house isn’t done yet.
Well-planned lighting can easily transform how the space feels, which also helps create depth, warmth, and visual harmony in your new home. Perfect lighting isn’t just about installing lights in various rooms in your house, but also about emphasising the structure, texture, and focal points in the architecture of the house.
In this article, we’ll discuss how lighting design enhances your home’s architecture.
1. Accentuating Architectural Features
If your new home has exposed beams, textured walls, arches, and decorative ceilings, architectural lighting can easily highlight them, making your space look better and bigger. Some lighting techniques, such as cove lighting for defining the spaces, wall washing for textures, and spotlights, hidden LEDs, and uplights, can draw attention to mouldings, art, and other architectural details.
Nowadays, there’s a trend of having no main light, which has been replaced by layered lights, such as wall sconces, recessed lights, and concealed LED strips. The layered lights can transform your space into something that feels sophisticated and welcoming at the same time. So, if you’ve put effort into hiring an architect for your new home, you can highlight their work by preparing the lights the right way.
2. Creating Depth and Dimension
When it comes to the layering of lights, it usually includes task, ambient, and accent lighting to create balance, depth, and character in your new home. Ambient lights focus on bringing the functional areas, including the home office, kitchens, and reading nooks, that can help improve the precision depending on the needs of the space.
On the other hand, task lights are all about functionality for areas such as the offices, kitchen, and reading nooks. Lastly, accent lights are best used for lighting artworks, architectural details, and textures. Since there’s no main light in layered lights, there’s harmony among the lights installed, which can also provide sophistication and enhance the atmosphere.
3. Enhancing Mood and Atmosphere
As mentioned, the layering of lights, or the concept of no main light, is an essential part in shaping the mood and atmosphere of your new home. Lighting has a psychological impact, specifically in influencing mood, energy, and comfort.
There can be a cosy and homey feeling when there are warm tones from lamps and wall sconces that are perfect for relaxation. Meanwhile, cool white lights provide a modern, fresh, and energising feel. If you want a more flexible and seamless transition, you may opt for adjustable or dimmable lights.
If you’re able to layer the light intensity based on the needs and architecture of your house, you can tailor the emotional tone of each room. For instance, in the home office, you need a mix of bright and dim lights, so that it’s not too harsh and not too dim.
4. Blending Indoors and Outdoors
Aside from the interior, you should also consider the lighting of the exterior part of the house. In doing so, there should be a seamless blending of both. For the exterior, you can add some subtle pathway fixtures. Adding outdoor lighting highlights the best features of the columns, stonework, and landscaping, and enhances the kerb appeal. If there’s a seamless transition between the interior and exterior lighting, it can significantly help unite the whole property.
But before things come together, you need to ensure that the interior’s lighting has a mix of both elegance and functionality. Once done, you can then plan the lighting for the exterior. It’s important to ensure the balance between both main parts of the house, so that there won’t be a weird vibe at night.
5. Sustainability and Smart Lighting
Nowadays, modern lights offer sustainable and smart features. It’s a combination of technology, style, and sustainability, which suits well with new, modern homes. Homeowners can now enjoy the advancements of smart lighting systems and LED. These new lighting technologies offer longer use, less power consumption, and come with a wide range of colour temperatures that you can use to manage the mood and space.
In addition, there are lighting options that can be operated and adjusted using remotes, smartphones, motion sensors, timers, and other automated systems.
Final Thoughts
If you want to highlight the architecture of your new home, one of the things you can do is to design the lighting. In addition, it can also enhance mood, emphasise structure, and define how the space should be experienced.
Are you in the process of planning the lighting of your new home? Let us know how you’ve done it by commenting below!
